Re: [orca-list] date and time keybindings

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com>]

Hi Glenn.

> I prefer the JFW key bindings, as they seem most intuitive to me.

Intuitive or familiar?

>  I wish 
> someone would make a JFW-like set of key bindings that could be loaded into 
> Orca.

Do you also wish that someone would make a Windows-like set of key
bindings that could be loaded into GNOME?

As a reminder, the GNOME desktop is not Windows; Orca is not JAWS. There
is not a one-to-one correspondence between Orca commands and JAWS
commands, nor is there a one-to-one correspondence between Orca "modes"
and JAWS "modes". 

But even if we didn't care about that and figured we'd slap together
something that kinda sorta mapped for the sake of being familiar for
JAWS users, we're leaving out a bunch of folks. In order to be fair, we
should probably do the same thing for Window-Eyes and NVDA users. And
since Orca also has magnification functionality, we really need to do
mappings for folks coming to us from ZoomText and MAGic. Oops, almost
forgot: VoiceOver users.

So that means we'd require the following layouts:

1. Orca Desktop
2. Orca Laptop
3. JAWS-like Desktop
4. JAWS-like Laptop
5. Window-Eyes-like Desktop
6. Window-Eyes-like Laptop
7. NVDA-like Desktop
8. NVDA-like Laptop
9. ZoomText-like Desktop
10. ZoomText-like Laptop
11. MAGic-like Desktop
12. MAGic-like Laptop
13. VoiceOver-like Desktop
14. VoiceOver-like Laptop

More if we need to also ensure a smooth transition for Hal/SuperNova
users. ;-)

Then there's the maintenance: Even if we decided to discriminate against
all screen readers but JAWS in this loadable-layout scenario, that would
give us four keyboard layouts. Currently, when creating new Orca
commands, it's hard enough to find ideal, intuitive, available
keybindings. Now we also have to ensure that we find them for two
additional layouts? And I'd bet money that if we went to all the trouble
to do so, one of the things we'd see is confused and frustrated users
posting questions here to the effect of "I'm using the JFW-like set of
keybindings. So why isn't Orca working like JAWS?"

Having said all that, there's nothing stopping you from binding Orca's
commands to whatever you'd like them to be.

--joanie